Is soundstage DEPTH a myth?

@mihorn 

Good post.

I'd like to also add that the way modern recordings are made, ie assembled together rather than the capturing of a musical event in real time, is not going to help create any convincing impression of soundstage depth either.

Since 99.99% of commercial recordings were made with little or no consideration for sound quality, let alone soundstage depth, it could be considered more than a little irresponsible to advocate upgrading in pursuit of this elusive soundstage depth.

I've heard 1000s of recordings and hardly any of them could be considered as being up to audiophile standards.

None of the Beatles recordings were anything above average recording quality. Some of the Kinks albums, esp their often remastered masterpiece The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society album have bloody awful sound quality. Small, squashed, zero bandwidth, no depth.

It's kind of ironic that one the best recorded albums in my collection is the 1959/63 collaboration between Vera Lynn and Kenneth McKellar, The Wonderful World of Nursery Rhymes.

It's one of those rare ones that has real stage presence, you can easily picture the performers before you.

On any system regardless of price.

Upgrading can certainly give you more bandwidth, more precision, more separation, more detail, but it cannot give you what was never there in the first place.

Not unless you're into analysing exactly what the producers were doing with their 24 track mixing desks to a degree that no one ever intended you to. One that's liable to also induce a headache due to it being so unnatural.

We should remember that one of the very best recorded albums of recent history was also one of the most simplest. Mostly for its exquisite sonics, due more to serendipity rather than intent I suspect, the Cowboy Junkies Trinity Session album recorded on a portable machine in a church has subsequently gone down in audiophile legend.

There are also some very good reasons why the demonstration music used at shows regularly features the likes of Pink Floyd's DSOTM, Steely Dan and tinkly jazz. Engineers and producers operating in a cut throat business are usually far far too busy trying to make money than worry about what a few audiophiles might think about. Bands and artists generally don't seem to care much about anything other than commercial success either.

Selling, not sound quality is the main game in town.

So let's not kid anyone, out of the millions of commercial recordings there's probably less than a 100 that could be said to be of audiophile standard and possessing genuine soundstage depth.

Encouraging folks to engage in an everlasting search for things that do not exist can only do our hobby ultimate harm.

https://www.discogs.com/release/4351624-Vera-Lynn-Kenneth-McKellar-The-Wonderful-World-Of-Nursery-Rhymes

@alexberger

Some legendary vintage speakers produce sound stage depth very well.

Quad ESL57, Tannoy coaxial speakers from 50x-70x.

Well, yes but only with the right well recorded music.

It was the almost 3D imagery of the Quad Electrostatic when playing back some opera (LP) through some vintage Quad amps that sold them to me. That's probably still the closest I've been to that elusive 'reach out and touch' feeling in audio.

However, when I got them back home and put on Bruce Springsteen’s Greatest Hits CD, none of that imagery or depth was present. Neither was it on any of my other CDs or Minidiscs. You could call that a watershed moment in my audio journey.

The recordings matter the most.

My current speakers, the dual concentric Tannoy Berkeley’s from 1978 fall into the the same boat. The imagery is sometimes there, but only with the very best recorded albums. Albums recorded live with exquisite bandwidth, and usually minimal processing.

Joni Mitchell’s Travelogue from 2002 and Both Sides Now from 2000 certainly fall into that category, but they are rare examples. Incidentally, I would strongly recommend both of those orchestral re-recording albums to any fan of Mitchell’s.

@rodman99999

Could you please cite you sources, for the above figures/information?

Well, in all of the numerous articles/interviews I’ve read with engineers and producers neither the subject of sound quality nor soundstage has ever appeared.

When you also take into consideration the fact that virtually every single recording since the early 1990s has featured often heavy use of compression (the so-called ’loudness wars’) and realise just how extremely rare uncompressed recordings are, it’s hard not to come to the sad conclusion that the industry just does not care about sound quality.

If you were to scan through the Guinness Book of Hit Singles / Albums from the 1950s to the 2000s+ I think you will have to search hard and long to find many audiophile standard recordings amongst all of those thousands of hits and top 100 entries.

There are some who believe that even with the very best of recordings, the best loudspeakers with the quietest cabinets, the best rooms acoustically speaking, 2 channel audio is at best only able to give limited amount of realism/soundstage depth.

Some, like the physicist/audiophile Dr Edgar Choueri, argue that spatial audio could be the best way forward when it comes to sonically reproduced realism.

After hearing him speak on the Audioholics YouTube channel, I'm tending to agree with him.

@kirk9 

It has been years on the making but it would now appear as if the revolution in audio for decades is soon about to happen right under our noses.

To think that we might soon be able to experience some of the spatial audio sensations Dr Choueiri talks about, eg the bird that flies towards us and perches itself on our right or left shoulder.

Is this the future of Hi-Fi as we know it?